{"slug": "light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder", "title": "Light the Candle: An Offline Día de los Muertos Ofrenda Builder", "summary": "A developer built Ofrenda, an offline Día de los Muertos remembrance builder that runs an open-weight model locally via Ollama to generate a short remembrance, a \"letter back,\" and a list of ofrenda items from a user's memories of a loved one. The Flask app sends form data to a local model on localhost, with the model name set by a single config line so any Ollama-listed model can be swapped in, and the prompt instructs the model not to invent facts beyond what the user shared. The developer said privacy drove the local-only design: \"A closed API would have worked technically, but it would have meant sending the most personal text I could imagine to someone else's server.", "body_md": "*This is a submission for the [Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine](https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week4-2026-10-26)*\n\n**Ofrenda** is a private, offline remembrance builder for Día de los Muertos.\n\nYou enter a loved one's name, your relationship, their favorite foods and songs, and a memory. A local open weight model then writes three things: a short remembrance honoring them, a gentle \"letter back\" in a warm voice, and a list of items to place on your ofrenda. It all appears on a candlelit, marigold themed page.\n\nI read the theme \"Ghost in the Machine\" as the people who live on in our stories. On Día de los Muertos, the line between past and present gets thinner, and the machine here isn't haunted. It helps carry a memory forward. The most personal prompts I can imagine giving an AI are stories about people I miss, so I built it so those stories never leave my computer.\n\n[Link your GitHub repo here, or paste it with:\n\nA private, offline remembrance builder for Día de los Muertos, powered by an open-weight model running entirely on your own computer.\n\nEnter a loved one's name, favorite foods, favorite songs, and a memory. Gemma writes:\n\nAll inside a candlelit, marigold-themed page.\n\nBuilt for the **Ghost in the Machine** open-source AI challenge.\n\nThese are stories about people we love. Ofrenda uses an open-weight model running locally, so:\n\n`MODEL`) to use any other open model, or a…` localhost:11434`\n`requests`) that takes the form data, builds a prompt, and sends it to the local model\nThe prompt asks the model for three sections (REMEMBRANCE, LETTER BACK, OFRENDA ITEMS) and tells it not to invent specific facts beyond what the person shared. That matters because the \"letter back\" should feel true to the person, not like made up fiction about them.\n\nThe model name is one line of config, so any other model shown by `ollama list` can be swapped in.\n\nThis project is about real people we love, so privacy isn't a nice to have.\n\n`localhost`. A grandmother's recipes, a father's favorite song, a childhood story: none of it touches a server I don't control.\nA closed API would have worked technically, but it would have meant sending the most personal text I could imagine to someone else's server. For this project, open wasn't just cheaper. It was the right way to build it.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/j0bs-code/light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder-5545", "published_at": "2026-11-01 07:09:21+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-01 07:22:34.237113+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Ofrenda", "Ollama", "Gemma", "Flask", "Hacktoberfest"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/light-the-candle-an-offline-dia-de-los-muertos-ofrenda-builder.jsonld"}}